Margaret Mahy, Author of Children's Books, Dies at 76

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: July 29, 2012

Margaret Mahy, an award-winning children's author who tested the limits of her readers' whimsy and courage with fantastical tales of witches, hauntings, infinite fog, and robbers brought to account by peppery grown-ups wielding chocolate cake and balloons, died on Monday at her home in Christchurch, New Zealand. She was 76. The cause was cancer, a cousin, Ron Mahy, told the BBC.

Ms. Mahy wrote more than 150 books, including illustrated stories for small children like ''A Lion in the Meadow'' (1969), ''Beaten by a Balloon'' (1998) and the best-selling ''Bubble Trouble'' (2009), as well as young-adult novels, including ''The Haunting'' (1982), about a clairvoyant boy, and ''The Tricksters''(1987), in which a writer's characters come to life and play havoc with her family.

Ms. Mahy's stories often tapped what she called the ''surprises lurking in the heart of everything.'' Her own life did, too.

She had been working as a librarian, writing children's books for years without much success, when an American publisher stumbled on one of her stories in 1969 in a New Zealand educators' magazine. The publisher, Helen Hoke Watts, telephoned Ms. Mahy to arrange a hasty visit.

''I collected her from the airport and she stayed at the pub just up the road from my place in Governors Bay,'' Ms. Mahy recalled in a 2006 magazine interview. ''She said, 'My God, this really is the end of the world -- they don't accept American Express!' '' Over the next few days, Ms. Watts read through everything Ms. Mahy had ever written.

By the end of the year Ms. Watts's company, Franklin Watts, had published six of Ms. Mahy's books. The first, ''The Lion in the Meadow,'' became a perennial seller. Dozens more were released soon after, most of them previously rejected manuscripts from Ms. Mahy's closets. In 1980, she gave up her day job.

Reviewers raved about her whimsical yet hard-edged sensibility, her grasp of childhood's astonishments, her ability to leaven unbelievable situations with believable characters.

Reviewing ''The Haunting'' in The New York Times, the children's book author Colby Rodowsky said her writing ''took one's breath away'' at times, and gave as one example the ghost who swings ''from side to side, like an absent-minded compass needle searching for some lost North.''

Ms. Mahy began writing when she was 7, pursuing her vocation ''in a spirit of implacable plagiarism,'' she said in an interview with a British magazine, ''because, reading widely as I did, I rapidly came to feel that everything worthwhile had already been written.'' Intentionally or not, she articulated her credo as a writer in ''A Horribly Haunted School,'' a 1997 novel. ''Surprises were lurking in the heart of everything, and even a sensible life could be unexpectedly full of ghosts,'' she wrote. ''That way was the best way for any sensible life to be.''

Margaret Mahy, who was known as May, was born on March 21, 1936, in Whakatane, New Zealand, the oldest of six children. Her father, Frances George Mahy, was a construction engineer. Her mother, May, taught elementary school.

Ms. Mahy described herself in interviews as an ''unorthodox'' child who liked to talk to herself. She once created a stir by insisting that she spoke the language of animals. She ''proved it,'' she said, by walking on all fours, ''eating leaves, drinking from puddles, and so forth.''

She received her undergraduate degree and a master's in English in New Zealand and became a librarian in 1957 after training at the New Zealand Library School.

Ms. Mahy, who never married, is survived by two daughters, Penelope and Bridget, and a granddaughter.

She was the first author from outside Britain to receive the Carnegie Medal, Britain's top award for children's literature, winning it in 1982 for ''The Haunting'' and in 1984 for ''The Changeover.'' In 2006 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, an international prize.

Ms. Mahy, a big believer in reading aloud to children, made many appearances at local schools to read from her books, often dressed in an elaborate feathered outfit and multicolored wig.

She was known for her quirky rhymes. In ''Bubble Trouble,'' for example, in which a mischievous baby is caught in a bubble and blown toward a church where a choir is rehearsing, she wrote:

''But Abel, though a treble, was a rascal and a rebel, fond of getting into trouble when he didn't have to sing/Pushing quickly through the people, Abel clambered up the steeple with nefarious intentions and a pebble in his sling.''

She told interviewers that her love of children was rooted less in mothering instincts than in a sense of common cause. By way of illustration, she described a decision she made late in life. ''My mother used to say never get a tattoo, you'll only be sorry,'' she said.

So when she was 62, she got a tattoo.

''I thought I haven't got a lot of time to be sorry,'' she said, ''and it might be rather fun to have a pirate tattoo.''

She had it etched on her right shoulder: a tattoo of a skull with a rose in its teeth.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.